Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Localising into Navajo

We were quite happy when someone came along to localise at translatewiki.net. This lasted until the time when we wanted to commit the localisations to SVN. We found that in stead of finding texts that we could not understand, the "localisations" were in English.

According to the person who provided this in stead of a localisation in Navajo, "there's a decision to leave roll-over messages and tooltips in English as the sociolinguistic setting dictates "bilinguality". That is all very good but at translatewiki.net we do not accept this as a practice; a language deserves respect even when bilinguality is considered to be the norm among some.

It is obvious that administrators can localise locally but it is equally obvious that this is detremental for the support of the Navajo language. It is also not much of a threat.

What is more problematic is that the names of namespaces are considered to be insulting. If true it needs to be remedied but the trust in this person is largely gone because of his refusal to localise all messages in Navajo and his level 1 understanding of the language. The question is what to do..Thanks, GerardM